Dana Whitfield
Design lead
NABCEP PV Installation Professional
Fifteen years designing arrays, the first six of them in New England where snow load and low winter sun teach you to respect a model. Writes every production estimate we publish.
Why we do it this way
Two of our founders spent years as service electricians before they touched a module, which shapes everything about how this company works. Service electricians spend their days fixing other people's shortcuts: the undersized conductor, the lug nobody torqued, the penetration flashed with sealant instead of a proper boot. That experience makes you suspicious of anything sold on a monthly payment.
So the practice here is the opposite. Every proposal carries the specific yield we used, the shade fraction we measured on each plane, the degradation rate applied and the escalation rate assumed. If a customer wants to argue with the model, they have everything they need to do it. Several have, and a few of them were right.
The second habit is turning work down. A roof below 70 percent total solar resource fraction, a roof with eight years of shingle left, a commercial site whose load peaks after dark: these are all cases where the honest answer costs us the sale. We would rather lose it than spend the next twenty five years defending a model we did not believe when we wrote it.
The third is watching what we build. Every system we install stays on the monitoring desk with alert thresholds set from its own design model. A failing module should reach us within weeks. It should not reach the customer as a strange bill the following April.
